Interview: ‘Frances Ha’ star Greta Gerwig

The actress discusses her acclaimed new collaboration with Noah Baumbach.

After acting in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, actress Greta Gerwig struck up a creative collaboration with the acclaimed writer-director. This resulted in a witty, observant script about a New York dancer struggling to get her bearings, both personally and professionally. Abandoning traditional production methods, the real life couple made the film in private—it wasn’t announced until just weeks before it premiered on the festival circuit last fall—following a loose shooting schedule that took them from New York City to Poughkeepsie, California, and even France. We spoke to Gerwig about this inspired collaboration and the floundering dreamer she inhabits onscreen. -- Jonathan Doyle

Writing with Baumbach
“We’re similar in that we discover characters through dialogue and they kind of reveal themselves to us. I felt like in some ways we found Frances through these moments and these scenes and these pieces. We had her rhythms of speaking and how she was funny and how she was sad and how she was cocky. We didn’t over-talk it because I think sometimes your conscious mind as a writer is quite boring and what you’re able to come up with if you stop trying to regulate it is much more interesting and multi-dimensional. Sometimes trying to reduce people to qualities makes them flat. People are so many things at once and you have access to that if you can let go of trying to control it. It takes a lot of patience to let it emerge for you. There’s a quote by Borges, who’s one of my favourite writers, and he says, ‘A good line here or there is luck or chance and only the mistakes are real.’ I always feel that way. The only thing you can do is mess it up.”

The alchemy of collaboration
“Most of it felt like it was really a pure collaboration in the sense that it was an alchemy that created a third thing. It’s not like one part’s Noah, one part’s Greta. Another thing happens once the collaboration happens that neither one of us has access to alone. I’m not a musician, I’ve never written songs, but it’s what I imagine it’s like to write a song with someone else. There’s some songwriting teams where it’s like, ‘You do the music and you do the lyrics.’ We’re more of the kind where everybody’s doing everything. When you hear the song, you can’t hear like—to be totally clear, I’m not comparing myself to The Beatles—that’s John and that’s Paul. When you listen to their solo stuff, it’s all amazing, but they don’t have access to that thing that they had access to when they were working together.”

The transition from writing to acting
“The script was so set in stone and we spent a long time getting it as perfect as we could. Then there was no improvisation at all on set, so there was a real separation for me. I was writing and then I was acting. I wasn’t writing while I was acting, so I felt like my roles switched. I didn’t experience it as feeling like I was handing over the film to Noah as much as I felt like I was letting it live through me in a way. It’s almost as if you have to take everything you put into the script and you have to channel it through you. I felt like I was embodying all these things that I was writing for years, so I always felt like I was really living inside it. While I was acting, I was totally underwater with the character and letting Noah look at everything on the surface, but before action and after cut, I saw the whole thing as well. So it didn’t feel like I was ceding power so much as I was going under.”

Working under the radar
“This was done so under the radar and so no one was looking at it. The way movies are sometimes put together, they’re like, ‘Greta Gerwig will be playing this part and we’re following every step of the production.’ And then everybody’s anticipating, ‘What is it going to be like?’ That’s a terrifying experience, but in some ways, the kind of isolated underground nature of how we did it relieved some of that terror because it wasn’t something the world was looking for or asking for. There’s something about the lack of expectation around it that made it seem—for me anyway—easier to wrap my head around.”

The dance metaphor
“I loved ballet while I was growing up, but I outgrew it the way most people do, in terms of physically I just wasn’t built for it and it’s quite punishing if you’re not. But I did a lot of modern dance in college and I loved it. I wasn’t great at it, but I loved it and I met all these women who were dancers and I was so moved by their stories and I loved the way they danced. It was called release technique. A lot of it was about falling and about how when you fall in dance, if you tensed up the muscles through it, you’re gonna get hurt and bruised and if you give in to gravity and almost lean into the fall, you’re gonna be okay. I always felt that was kind of a beautiful metaphor for life.”

Losing your dream
“I knew a girl who was an apprentice with a dance company in New York and she was taking classes and training with them and then when she was 26, they said, “You can keep doing this, but you’ll never be part of the company.” That’s horrible, but she’s fine now. She’s in medical school. She took all that discipline and directed it toward something else, but I just thought that was such an ultimate heartbreak and, of course, how do you not go for what your dream is? Of course you go for it, but the ability to re-adjust when it doesn’t work out is something that I think is so necessary and so heartbreaking.”

Frances’ best friend
“Characters aren’t characters in isolation. They’re characters because of the way they relate to the people around them. I feel like it’s through Sophie (Frances’ best friend in the film) that you know how Frances loves, which is crazily and too obsessively, but also lion-hearted. You need the person that could inspire that in Frances. When Mickey [Sumner] auditioned, I had the very strange experience—and sometimes this happens when you’re acting—I almost forgot about myself. I felt like it was Sophie and because of that I lost all my self-consciousness and I felt like I had access to the character of Frances in a totally organic way and I think that, for me, I’m an actor who really finds things through other people. She almost had a… I won’t say a coldness, but there was a way in which she wasn’t trying to prove to us that she was really close to Frances. When you’re really intimate with someone, you’re not fawning over them all the time, you just know them. It’s almost like you don’t need to look at them. You know what they’re doing. You’ve seen them do it a million times. She tapped into that feeling right away.”

Acting muscle
“Acting—especially film acting—is real muscle. It takes a lot of stamina and endurance and it feels like running a marathon. By the end of it, I felt like I was very strong. I knew everything was working, firing on all cylinders. If you come in and do a supporting role, it can be kind of worse because everything’s been going and you’re on for like two days. It’s terrifying because it feels so much more like just jumping into a pool and getting out right away, as opposed to getting used to the temperature.”

The joy of stress
“I love movie sets. I love them. They’re my favourite place to be and everyone who worked on this film felt that way. It was the kind of environment where no one ever asked, “When’s lunch? When is this over? When can we go home?” We would work until someone looked like they were gonna pass out and then we would say, “Oh, we should order some food.” And then we would eat all standing up—just slices of pizza—and we’d keep going because we were so addicted to the work, but also in love with the process. I’ve always enjoyed these experiences. Even when I was in college, my favourite times were finals week when everyone was in the library cramming and writing papers and then you would run into someone at the coffee stand and you’d laugh harder than you’ve ever laughed in your life because it was so stressful. I loved that environment and I’ve always liked those high pressure places.”